As a graduate student, I once drew a rather bad cartoon of an old schoolmarm (complete with Gary Larson-style beehive) standing in front of a class saying, “And when you finish your five-paragraph ...

A common teaching tool among English teachers is the five-paragraph essay because it helps students write about any given topic. It’s been the building block of composition classes for decades, and ...

In the most abstract sense, the function of an introductory paragraph is to move the reader from the world of daily life into the textual and analytical space of an essay. In a more concrete sense, an ...